


Heaven Blue

by Hours_and_Days



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:02:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28886532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hours_and_Days/pseuds/Hours_and_Days
Relationships: Chrisjen Avasarala/Sadavir Errinwright
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

It happened a long time ago, when they were younger, when they were dressed up, when they were working late together. As such things do.

It was the end of the first day of a trade summit, fairly early in their UN careers but not so early that they weren’t both key figures at the negotiating table. The talks had gotten tense—nothing she couldn't handle, but he had been rattled; she could tell. It had been a long day, nearly nine hours of talks, followed by a state dinner (defined as veal and asparagus consumed with all the assholes you had just spent the entire day arguing with).

Chrisjen had taken advantage of the hourlong break between the talks and dinner to nap and bathe and redo her hair and put on a sari in a color he had once described, half-smiling, in the way that he did, as “heaven blue.” She arrived at dinner just a minute before everyone began to look for their places at the table and graciously pretended not to notice the way conversation faltered as everyone turned to look at her. When they had turned back to their groups of two or three, she glided past the table and surreptitiously switched a few place cards around.

A few minutes later, he sat down in the chair to her left, smelling of the woods after it rained, hair still damp. She was not distracted by him. She spent most of the meal turned to her right, pretending, with superlative skill and charm, to be interested in the pontifications of the lead Martian negotiator, whose place next to her at the table was due to her swift-fingered maneuvers with the place cards. When the hapless man rose from dinner a couple of hours later, filled to the brim with Spanish wine and her dazzling attention, he was beaming at her. He would be an easy mark when the negotiations regarding Europa began the next day, she thought, very satisfied with her day’s work.

She turned to her left, where *he* was still seated, looking as defeated as she was exhilarated. That wouldn’t do. “Come to my office for a drink," she'd said.

He was on the sofa, with his drink—she had introduced him to high-end smoky single-malt—in his right hand, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his left. He was wearing fine, dark grey wool and blinding white linen. All cut beautifully. She had helped him choose the suit and it was immensely gratifying to see him in it. It really did hang so well on him, she thought, then, to derail a train of thought perhaps best not pursued, she recalled with a smirk a moment early in the day, when she had noticed a female Martian negotiator blushing furiously after he—who had only been wearing his usual, unforgivably understylish navy at the time—had smiled at her. Chrisjen had taken full advantage of her momentary discomfiture to change the direction of the conversation. The blushing Martian had not returned to the negotiating table after lunch. Poor little girl. She would better control the flow of blood to her cheeks in the future. Or get the fuck out of politics.

Though, tonight, in his soft brushed charcoal-colored suit and flawless flat shirtfront...well, it was fortunate that Chrisjen never blushed.

"I was a disaster, Chrisjen," he said, interrupting her musings.

"Don't be absurd, Sadavir," she replied, sitting down next to him. She had rather expected this; hence the drink invitation. “You charmed that pitiful girl clear out of the room, which left them down a man, and you secured an important concession on mineral rights on Callisto. You acquitted yourself handsomely. Pun very much intended."

He looked up and seemed puzzled. "What girl?"

She smiled. "Never mind."

He retained his quizzical look for another moment, then he seemed to give up, sighing heavily. "You were like a sorceress in there. You always are. I don't know how you do it."

"It's my great beauty, didn't you know?" she sighed, pulling her updo down into dark, smooth waves that spilled over her shoulders. (Why had she done that, she wondered now, vaguely, barely able to focus her mind on the question. Why, indeed.) He glanced up, that half-smile on his face, but started at the sight of her with her hair down.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

He couldn’t speak, apparently, for a moment, and then he laughed shortly. "Your great beauty doesn't hurt," he said, almost in a whisper. He took another sip of scotch. She saw the tawny gold liquid quivering, just a little, in the glass as he lowered it. He was shaking. Just a little.

"Look," she said. "You did a perfectly adequate job today. I won't fucking participate in your self-pitying fiction that you did not."

"Perfectly adequate," he said darkly.

"I have to reserve my higher compliments for when you improve, which you will. That is how you will know that I mean them," she said.

He looked at her and something in his face changed. "I know I can trust you to tell me the truth, Chrisjen," he said. "That means a lot to me. It means everything.” He paused. “I will strive to be better than ‘perfectly adequate’ tomorrow."

"I know you will, and that is why you will succeed," she replied, warmly, placing a hand on his cheek.

She had not expected his eyes to  
close at her touch, but they did. She had not expected his head to tilt just a little towards her palm, but it did. She did not take her hand away. He put his drink down blindly and covered her hand with one of his own.

“Chrisjen,” he whispered. Half moaned, really.

“Look at me,” she said. She felt suddenly relaxed, as if they had not just spent nearly twelve hours talking about the Jovian moons with the Martians. Or maybe it was because they had: they had worked hard and done well, both of them, for Earth.

He obeyed. She removed her hand from his cheek. He looked suddenly lost, unmoored, when her touch was withdrawn. He reached out, trembling, and gently touched her face as if desperate but terrified to reestablish the connection. She hesitated just a moment, and then decided. She moved closer to him, and rested her fingertips lightly on his chest, telling him: it’s okay. Yes. Go ahead and touch me.

He ran his fingers lightly along her hairline, her jaw, her parted lips, her neck and collarbone. She sat still, closed her eyes, allowed herself to feel his touch, her fingers barely denting his fine white shirt. She realized that she was also trembling.

(That seemed a bit much, she thought to herself in woozy surprise, recalling it so many years later, but it was true. She had trembled for him.)

But why him? she wondered, even then, in the moment. What was it about him? He was handsome, but not jaw-dropping. Intelligent, but not especially charming. Maybe it was just the beautiful suit.

Or maybe it was that he had always so obviously—but so quietly—adored her. It was hard, she supposed, not to come round to desiring a man whose mouth said things like, “Do you have a moment to discuss steel tariffs?” while his eyes said things like, “I will do anything you want, and follow wherever you lead.” Not in a pathetic, puppy-dog way, either; she could not have borne that. In a way that said, clearly and simply, “My heart and mind are yours, unequivocally, everlastingly, amen.”

And then there was the fact—she had known it for a fact, even then—that someday he would be powerful. Oh, very, very powerful. Why would this matter to her? She, who was already the brightest star in every room she entered, and was only going to burn brighter? The burden of being a rising star was one she was only too glad to bear, as a rule. But it was a little...lonely. And Sadavir Errinwright would, someday, she felt sure, be the most powerful man on the planet. In the solar system. He was the only man she had ever met whom she thought might one day eclipse her. How could she not want to possess him? Her breathing accelerated slightly.

His fingers began gently pushing aside the stiff blue silk brocade that draped over her right shoulder. So gently that the fabric didn’t budge. He stopped trying and leaned in to kiss her neck, softly.

“Sadavir,” she said. He raised his head and looked at her. His expression was a cross between idol-worship and terror. For fuck’s sake.

“Sadavir, have you forgotten whom you’re dealing with? I’m not a goddamned orchid.”

She looked at him steadily and watched, with a slow burn spreading throughout her body, as his face changed: momentary surprise, then a flicker of that half-smile, and at last—there it was—the bloody, carnivorous expression of a man whose ambition would one day propel him to the highest offices, where he would bend the entire solar system to his will—as far in as the hot nuclear sun, as far out as the drifting, ice-blue spheres beyond the Belt—all of it, and all for the good of Earth. She saw it in his face and—god forgive her, she thought now, as she slid in and out of consciousness—she had reveled in it, gloried in her ability to bring it out in him. But how could she be blamed? How could she, of all women, be expected to desire a weak man?

And he had risen to the occasion magnificently after that, kissing her mouth with authority; commanding her to remove the yards of expensive lapis silk that stood in his way (an order she obeyed slowly, enjoying his eyes on her, basking in his newfound entitled impatience); pulling her body, half-revealed to him in its delicate silk chemise, to his; lifting her as if she weighed nothing (which was not true—he was, to her delight, physically stronger than she had anticipated) and pressing her back against the wall. She had wrapped her legs around his waist and sighed with pleasure. Thank god he had not tried to lay her down; as if she would have tolerated lying beneath him, or respected him for allowing her to be on top. He had read her perfectly, and she adored him for that.

And so, for a few exquisite minutes she enjoyed him like the fine whiskey that still lingered on his breath; they were cheek to cheek, or buried in each other’s necks, or he was kissing her mouth; and in the final moments they looked one another straight in the eyes, like UN blues and MCRN dusters arrayed on either side of an invisible line, waiting for orders to fire.

It had happened only once; it had needed to happen only once, and besides, Arjun, to whom she had been married only a short time, expected her to be “mostly faithful” and she mostly was. But it had been inevitable, and necessary, and exactly how she had wanted it...when she allowed herself later to admit that she had. As for him—it changed him, and it didn’t. He was as quietly devoted as he’d ever been. Sometimes she thought he might actually love her. His marriage, certainly, had fizzled out rapidly. But he was less pliable, more sure of his own judgments, more likely to fix her with his steady gaze and say with his mouth, “I think you’re mistaken, Chrisjen,” while his eyes said, “I have known you and you have known me and you know perfectly well what that did to us both.” Which she did.

Or did she? Perhaps she hadn’t, didn’t. Perhaps, she thought suddenly, tasting blood on her lips, she had known nothing of what that night did, to either of them—because if she had, surely they would not have ended up...here?

All of this played through her mind—maybe it was all the thigh-clenching, she thought, with what might well be her last opportunity for mirth—as the high-g burn like a stone on her chest pressed her deeper into her seat on the Razorback, and blood seeped from her nose and she could not clench or whistle any longer, or move any longer, or see, or stay conscious however much she tried. Why think of him now? Now, when he had betrayed her, and Earth, so completely? Why think of him, instead of Arjun, instead of any of hundreds of sweet nights with Arjun?

She remembered the taste of his mouth, behind the hint of expensive scotch. The expression on his face when he understood that she was not doing him any favors, that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. The strength of his arms as he held her up. The sound of her own name when he cried it out. And the sum total of these memories was nearly—nearly—enough to block the image of his face on that screen only a few hours ago, block the sound of his voice condemning her to death with the words “clean up the mess.” She remembered that night because this day—this impossible day—she needed desperately to forget. If she died here, now...she whispered his name and allowed herself to drift away, into his arms, into the dark.


	2. Chapter 2

This is a woman I love,” he said.

Maybe it was because his mouth had grown too accustomed to lies to accommodate speaking such a truth aloud that he followed it with such a tremendous falsehood.

“She’s been like a mother to me.”

Of all the terrible crimes he had committed, and the greater ones he had enabled, Sadavir Errinwright thought, the moment the words left his throat, that speaking these words was the worst thing he’d ever done.

He left Sorrento-Gillis’s office, strolled to his own suite, and entered the bathroom, where he promptly threw up.

Of course, he thought, as he rinsed the taste of sick from his mouth with scotch—the only thing he seemed to drink anymore, no matter the occasion or time of day—only someone who had swallowed the things he had done, integrated the horrors into his cells and then stared, fascinated, at his own transformed and entirely unfamiliar face in the mirror could possibly judge telling a shitty lie about a woman he had once fucked to be the worst thing he had ever done. Was it worse than (say, just for example) having people killed? Or enabling mass murder? Or murdering someone outright with a vial of poison so green it may as well have had “Caution! For villains only” etched on it?

He drank more. At any rate, he had just done it again, at least only in his own head this time. “A woman he had once fucked.” That was more aligned with the truth than the nauseating mother comparison. But it didn’t come close to the truth about his feelings for Chrisjen Avasarala. “Feelings,” he said aloud, and laughed a little, and drank. What a feeble concept: feelings. How inadequate to explain or express the way he had always needed her. Luna didn’t have “feelings” for Earth. His love for Chrisjen was similarly orbital. He was tidally locked to her, had no choice in the matter, had never had any choice.

He had been her faithful cold satellite, watching as the sun rose and set upon her, for nearly two decades—until her disappointment over the awful, sickening blunder he’d made in trusting Jules-Pierre Mao and his alien slime had instantaneously and efficiently destroyed him. He had misjudged, misread, misunderstood: he thought he was putting Earth first but she saw his actions as betrayal. Of her? Of Earth? Of some creed or principle that she honored but had never bothered to share with him? He honestly wasn’t sure. “Earth must come first” had been her only creed that he knew of, and her view of his actions genuinely startled him. He thought she would understand, or, considering how things had turned out, at least forgive. Until it became clear that she wouldn’t.

The only thing he was sure of now was that nothing would be the same between them, ever again. He had been in one moment, with one look from her, smashed and dismantled. He was like Deimos now, still orbiting, but in pieces.

He thought of Jules-Pierre Mao’s ship in pieces. He had known she would escape. The thought that any order or action of his could kill her was ludicrous—impossible. He had barked at Mao to clean up the mess and get the fuck back to work! because it sounded threatening and he had wanted that rich, arrogant bastard to tremble—but of course he hadn’t meant it, not the part about her, anyway, because he knew it was impossible. She had made his entire life one long mess, and it would never be cleaned up. Not by her death or her continued life. More to the point, ordering her death was like ordering the sun to power down: give all the orders you want, and good luck with your endeavor.

He wondered idly if she knew that he lacked the power to kill her, or if she believed he really had tried. Perhaps it was better if she thought he had tried. She had always liked to watch him score points, win fights, crush people. He hoped the other part of the message (“Chrisjen, if you’re listening”) hadn’t sounded too pathetic. Too weak. There was no quality she despised more, as far as he could tell. When he was kind, solicitous, compassionate, she treated him with amused condescension. Like a mother with her son, he thought suddenly, disgusted. It was only when he was hard, ruthless, relentless, that he would see a flicker of what she had given him that night.

That night.

That night was the root of the problem, ultimately. It was the moment he had seen the truth, clearly, for the first time. He loved her. But she would never love anything but power.

He wished the details of that night were not so deeply burned into the soft flesh of his mind, but they were. It was after the New York round of talks on the Jovian moons. It was after the dinner (veal: yuck) at which he had at first been elated to find himself seated next to her, looking forward to a couple of blissful hours of her having to lean close to him to ensure that no one else heard whatever observations, conclusions, strategies, and cutting remarks about the Martians she might need to convey to him, and then had been bitterly disappointed to realize that she had switched the place cards (of course he noticed; she did not take a breath that he did not notice) not for the purpose of sitting next to him, but in order to make love to the lead Martian diplomat all evening. (It *had* paid off the next day. It was as if she had transformed him from flint to gelatin. Such was her power. But charm was only one of her many powers. She could have plowed through the Martian just as easily had he remained flint, and he knew this as he glanced over time and again to see only the back of her head. Her skill at functioning as the diplomatic equivalent of a rail gun made these machinations all the more irritating. They were unnecessary, and deprived him of her company.)

He had struggled through a couple of hours of stilted conversation with the Martian on his other side, and when his milquetoast companion finally retired he had just sat there. Sulking—he could admit it.

He flushed now, remembering the way his heart had leapt when she rose, a column of heaven-blue silk, turned to him, frowned, and said, “Sadavir, you look like shit. Come to my office and have a drink.”

Walking with her up to her suite, he was pleased to see that she did not in fact seem to think he looked like shit; he was wearing the suit she’d all but picked out for him and she clearly liked the way he looked in it. He kept catching her glancing at him when she thought his eyes were elsewhere. Where else would he be looking, when she was next to him?

In her suite, she had poured them both drinks and offered a toast: “To a job well done today. To fucking over the goddamned Martians.”

He had groaned and put his head in his hands. “I was a disaster today, Chrisjen,” he’d said.

“Sadavir,” she’d said, “I will not fucking participate in this self-pitying fiction.”

Then she’d said something about a girl he had charmed—he’d had no idea what she meant—and told him he’d done a “perfectly adequate” job during the talks.

God. It really did take immense strength of ego to love her. But what he’d said to her in reply—that he relied on her to tell him the truth—had itself been entirely true. He’d never met anyone he was so absolutely certain he could trust to tell the truth. He wondered now if he had not always mistook her inerrant truth-telling for perfect judgment.

Anyway, he could have stood then, thanked her for the drink, and left, but exhaustion or inertia or the simple desire to stay in her presence a little longer made him sip his drink and keep talking. He’d given her a compliment the specifics of which he no longer remembered, but it didn’t matter because whatever it was, she would have deserved it.

And then she had sat next to him and taken her hair down. A number of years he had known her by this time, and he had never seen her with her hair down.

It was like a waterfall, nightfall, oceans of dark waves cascading down over her shoulders, accompanied by the sudden smell of flowers. Rose and orange blossom and—oh god, what did it matter which fucking flowers? It was just hair—but it wasn’t. It was like she had revealed a whole new dimension of herself, one he had been denied access to until now, one he was suddenly being permitted to see. He loved her so much in that moment he was rendered speechless.

And then she had touched him. And it was over, then. He knew when her hand met his cheek that either he would have her tonight or he would walk from her suite to the roof of the building and jump.

He often felt afterwards that jumping would have left him better off.

In the precious few minutes it had lasted she had somehow made him feel...how? How had he felt? Like a magnificent animal, a comet, a king. A bloodied beast and the hunter who slays him. (The drink was turning him poetic, it seemed.) He had felt, for the first time, that he deserved her and was her equal. Could there be any feeling better than that? And then it was over, so fast; he would have been a bit embarrassed by how fast, but she had clearly “concluded” rapidly as well. For him it was a matter of unleashing years of stoppered desire. For her?

Understanding what it was for her had taken him some time, and required knowing what happened afterwards.

After a simultaneous, face-to-face climax of a kind many couples never achieve, they had tripped and stumbled to the couch and sat there, panting, not looking at one another, her hand resting on his shaking thigh. She had laughed softly and then, astonishingly, tucked her legs beneath her on the couch, burrowed under his arm, put her head on his shoulder, and fallen asleep. She must be cold in that little provoking scrap of silk, he had thought. He was still mostly dressed. He reached behind him for the soft woven throw she kept on her sofa and put it over her. Then he sat in a daze of happiness, feeling her body curled against his, her flower-scented hair inches from his face.

When she woke, he pretended that he had been asleep, too, instead of blazingly awake and replaying every moment of the evening again and again in his mind. She had stretched and smiled at him, and then said, “I should call Arjun. He will think I’ve been up to no good.”

And she’d risen from the couch and put on a robe and called her husband.

That had been the start of it, really—the start of his cellular transformation into this thing he was now, a thing that was dark and glowing and destructive. He laughed out loud in the growing darkness of his office (how long had he been sitting and drinking?). She was his own, personal protomolecule.

Because he had truly and profoundly changed after that night. For weeks afterward he struggled to maintain composure in her presence, was tormented by fantasies about a “next time” that never happened and, he soon realized, never would. He refused to believe what he had seen with devastating clarity that night: that she was only fully present to him when she could see a monster behind his eyes. Waking to find that he’d held her tenderly in his arms while she slept, she had shrugged him off to call her husband. He refused to believe it until he could no longer deny it. She always said he would be great one day—some sort of master of the universe. The return to their old normal relationship—at least on her part—showed him the truth: she had wanted nothing from him that night but to test her hypothesis. Did he have it in him? Presumably, she thought so, judging from the way she had dug her nails into him at the end. And evidently, he thought grimly (refill drink, drain it down, refill), she’d been right. He did have it in him. She had wanted so badly to see it. And then she called it “betrayal.”

“And what does that make her, anyway?” he said aloud to the empty room, slurring just a bit. How was she any less of a monster? How could he have known—what sacred text or work of moral philosophy would have told him—that draping a Belter on a wall in one-g was within the pale and supporting Mao’s creepy science experiment was beyond it? And what kind of woman only loves a man when he’s playacting the role of a vengeful god but then shies away when he proves he can do more than act the part?

Perhaps this was why he hated Sorrento-Gillis’s little blonde conscience so much. Why could he not have loved a woman like her? Jodie was a woman like her, and every bit as lovely, and he had been entirely unable to generate any but the most tepid feelings for her. The truth was simply that Chrisjen, however monstrous, was, for him, lush, heaven-blue Earth, and everyone else was Mars: barren, empty, not the same, not enough. Earth first, as she said, always.

He sat for a long time, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing except drunk, until at last he jerked awake, having apparently fallen asleep and spilled his remaining whiskey on his lap.

God. This had to stop. He got up and hurled the glass into the trash, where it thudded without breaking. It was a nice sturdy glass. Maybe he would retrieve it later. But for now—he changed into sweats, left his suite, and took the elevator downstairs to the gym. It was empty—not surprising, as it was nearly 2am. He ran on the treadmill for 45 minutes, his mouth sticky and head throbbing with every footfall. When he couldn’t take any more, he went back upstairs and drank a glass of water, then another, then a third. He brushed his teeth, showered and shaved and dressed. He regarded himself, murderer, stranger, in the mirror. He needed to accept that this is who he was now—to stop blaming her. Was his not the heart that had chosen her? Had that heart not learned to love the power she had shown him he could wield? Was he not the man who did all the things he had done? However he had become this man, this was the man he had become.

He stared at his reflection a moment longer and then turned away. It was not yet light out, but close to morning. Time to go and do the next wrong thing, and hope that the string of wrong things piling up behind him could add up, somehow, in the end, to the right thing—whether she saw it that way or not. He needed to leave her orbit, once and for all. To venture away, into the dark


	3. Chapter 3

The first message she received from him, imprisoned for his crimes against the state (language that no longer really applied but which had never been changed because ‘crimes against the planet’ sounded too much like littering), said, 

Chrisjen,   
For the sake of what we used to be, will you come and see me? I want to ask you a question.  
Sadavir

She wasn’t sure she wanted to see him, or think about what they used to be (whatever that was), or hear any questions, but—come to think of it—she would like very much to tell him off. That was worth a visit, certainly. So she sent word that she would come.

She arrived at the prison, a minimum security facility for political and white collar prisoners—defined as people who had killed or otherwise destroyed so many other people that making them suffer in proportion to their crimes was no longer possible, so the government just gave them a plain room to be alone in (with time in the “community room” every day, of course—the United Nations was a humane institution, at least if the prisoners were important enough) and sheets made from awful fabric they had probably never touched or even known about in their former, elegant lives, and tried to make everyone else forget they existed.

The guard opened the door for her. He was sitting at a small, narrow table in his plain room, facing her as she came in the door, his hands wrapped around a coffee cup. A second chair was pushed in at the table across from him; it didn’t match the table and she supposed it had been brought in for her. Or it was always there: part of the aesthetic torture of the room. A bed against the far wall was made up in a color that tried unsuccessfully to be either beige or grey. There was a bookshelf, full of books. A screen on one wall playing a news feed with the sound off. A door that must lead to a bathroom and a door that must lead to a closet. The light came from recesses in the ceiling. There was no window. She shuddered at the thought of being trapped here, away from the sky.

Any pity she might have felt was quickly stifled, however, when she read the expression on his face. She saw a kind of go-for-broke recklessness in his eyes. She didn’t like what it portended. She steeled herself for a tirade in which he blamed her for his crimes, began mentally sharpening the knives she would use to cut through whatever web of bullshit he was going to spin.

“Madam Secretary-General.”

“Save your ‘Madam’, Sadavir. Why am I here? You said you wanted to ask me something.”

“I do.”

“Well, what is it? My job at the United Nations—an organization you might remember from recent treason attempts you’ve made—is rather demanding, and I don’t have a lot of time. What did you want to ask?”

“Would you like to sit down?”

“No. Was that the question?”

“Can I offer you some coffee?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

“No. They bring coffee twice a day with meals and you missed lunch.”

“What a pity.”

“Not really. It’s shit.” He took a sip.

“Are we done with the witty repartee?”

“Sure.”

“Then ask your fucking question.”

“What did Arjun ever have that I didn’t?”

For some reason, she thought of the footage, which had emerged only the night before, of the poor idiot Belter who’d gone through the Ring. Splasshh.

“What did you just say to me?” she whispered.

“You heard me,” he said. “What did he have...that I didn’t?”

She was speechless for a moment. “That’s the question you want to ask me? Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?”

“Nope,” he said, his expression a show of bland innocence, as if he was inquiring about the quality of her weekend. He took another sip of his coffee.

He does not know, she thought, from some detached place in her mind, that he is about four seconds from having his throat ripped out like a fucking endangered antelope on the plains of New Kenya. Interesting.

She spoke in a low, throttled growl. “Why. THE FUCK. Do you think. I would answer. That question.”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

She exploded. “WHY NOT? You tried to have me killed!” she shouted.

His brows knitted and the insufferable, faux-cheerful look fell from his face.

“What? When?” he asked.

WHEN?

She stared at him again, open-mouthed, before recovering herself. “WHEN? On the Guanshiyin, you idiot! Have you killed so many people now that it just slips your mind?!”

He had gone pale and was staring at her with an odd, something’s-not-quite-adding-up-here expression, as if she had just told him she had seen him in a place and time he knew he hadn’t been. “I—I couldn’t have killed you on the Guanshiyin,” he said. “You couldn’t have—I knew you would survive, somehow. The Martian marine, and your spy...they would have...you couldn’t...”He faltered.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” she whispered, thinking that perhaps he actually had. “You gave the order. I saw you; I heard you. There could be no mistaking what you said.”

He had turned the color of ash. He was clutching the coffee cup like it was a handhold on a life raft.

She spoke softly. “Bobbie and Cotyar did save me, but you didn’t know they would.”

Her voice got softer. “You couldn’t have known they would.”

Then she took two quick steps toward him and slammed her palms down on the table. He started violently and knocked the coffee cup to the floor. She leaned towards him and shouted, “You couldn’t have been counting on that when you told Mao to ‘clean up the mess!’”

Her voice broke and she pushed back, turned away from him. Cry, and I’ll claw you out, she thought in the direction of her eyes.

He still wasn’t speaking. She turned around. He was just staring at her, as if he had never seen anything like her before in all his born days, like she had turned blue and grown wings.

“Speak, goddamn you!”

He started. “I—“ he coughed and swallowed. “I was trying to frighten Jules-Pierre Mao,” he said, his voice low and shaky. “I needed him to deliver the protomolecule to Earth, not Mars. After Eros—that...SHIT...used by Mars, against Earth—I couldn’t let that happen, at any cost...Korshunov...the Karakum...all of it...the protomolecule had to be Earth’s to use if we needed it. He had to be afraid of me. Mao. I had to make Mao afraid.”

“I know this part,” she snapped. “What about the part where you ordered him to clean me up?” She spoke the last three words with venom dripping from her voice. You couldn’t even say the words ‘Kill Avasarala?’ Grant me some fucking dignity as you order my assassination?”

“I could never have said—I could never have said those words,” he whispered.

“What you said amounted to the same thing! It was just cowardly! And—cruel.” She didn’t want to say it, but it came out. “It hurt, Sadavir,” she said, her voice betraying her pain; she knew her face probably was, too, and she hated this but she could not help it. The pain was seeping from her atoms like radiation and flowing out, uncontrollable. “It hurt! ‘Clean up the mess.’ After so many years.”

He looked stricken. “I—I didn’t think I could hurt you.”

“Forget about that!” she bit off. “I’m less concerned about my precious feelings than your order of execution!”

“That’s what I mean,” he said hoarsely. “I didn’t think I could hurt you.”

She shook her head back and forth as if shaking this idea up like a cocktail might force it to make some kind of sense. It didn’t work. She threw up her hands. “I don’t know what that means. You didn’t think you could hurt me? What. THE FUCK. Do you mean? What. THE FUCK. Were you thinking?” Her heart was pounding and her face, she was sure, was flushed. Her palms stung and her arms ached from the force with which she had hit the table.

His voice was almost plaintive: “How—how could you die?”

It was back to staring. She stared and stared and still could not grasp what she was hearing. Staring did not aid in comprehension, it seemed.

“And...me?” He pointed at himself with both hands, all his fingers curled inward, as if he was trying to explain the concept of himself to someone who didn’t speak the language. His lips were trembling and his face was contorted. “How could I possibly—“ He didn’t finish the sentence.

She just stood there, stunned. He gazed back at her, his expression of shock giving way to dawning horror. It was as if he had only just now understood that she was mortal.

She sat down in the chair across from him, suddenly exhausted. She closed her stared-out eyes and rubbed her eyelids lightly, then used her left hand to massage her right, then her right hand to massage her left. Ow.

“This has always been the problem, Sadavir,” she said quietly, at last. “You have always seen me as some sort of goddess. But I have never been anything but human.”

She opened her eyes and looked up because he had started to make an odd noise, and she realized that he was crying. No—sobbing, brokenly. “You could have died. I could have killed you.”

Oh, fuck no.

“Am I supposed to comfort you?” she snapped, all of her anger rushing back. “You are a grown man! You were so convinced that I was this untouchable thing, this perfect fantasy, that you behaved as if I was not even real! You could have ended my goddamned life because you have never understood that I am real!” She realized with a fresh burst of rage that tears had spilled from her traitorous eyes.

She stood up and turned towards the door and for a long minute, no one spoke and the only sounds in the room were of two people trying desperately, separately, to stop crying in front of one another.

Finally, he spoke. “Chrisjen,” he said, his voice hollow and slow. “I am so sorry.”

She did not turn around. Without planning it, without knowing where inside her the words came from, she replied.

“I could have loved you, Sadavir, if you had ever managed to convince yourself you were worthy of me. That’s what Arjun had that you didn’t.”

She called for the guard and when the door opened, she swept from the room.

*

That night, she told Arjun what had happened. A conversation ensued in which he asked whether his belief that he deserved her was the only thing keeping her in his arms. She did not know how to answer.

*

The second message she received from him said:

Chrisjen,  
I need to ask you another question. Please come back. Please come.  
Sadavir.

She went to see him again, without really knowing why.

“This had better be worth the time of the United Nations Secretary-General,” she said as she entered, though it felt a bit like fireworks on a Tuesday. Too much show for the occasion.

He looked haggard, like he hadn’t been sleeping much.

“I need to ask you something. About that night.”

“Didn’t we talk about that night enough last time I was here?” she said wearily. “You said you were sorry, and I know that you meant it, and under present circumstances, there is little else you can do. It does not fix it. But I accept the apology. I know you, Sadavir. I am still in a state of shock over the extent to which you have apparently never known me”—here he winced, with what seemed like real pain—“but I know you. I accept your apology.”

He nodded and swallowed hard. “Thank you. For accepting my apology. But—not that night,” he said. “The...the other night.” The next words came out in a rush. “If you’ve forgotten, then please turn now, and leave, and I will never bother you again.”

Oh. *That* night.

As if she could forget.

“Of course I haven’t forgotten.”

“Then I need to ask you—that night. Did you...were you...Did I—“

“Spit it out, my god!”

“I ordered you around,” he burst out. “I shoved you against a wall, didn’t give you much time to...before I...it’s just...the whole thing was almost...brutal, is what I mean. And then you fell asleep on me and I held you and then...you called Arjun. While I was there.”

“You have accurately related the events of the evening, Sadavir,” she said. “What’s your point?”

“I need to ask you: did I—did I hurt you? Did you pretend to be asleep to make sure nothing else happened and then call your husband because you were afraid I would hurt you again?”

She gasped aloud. She hadn’t been expecting that—not at all. The anguish on his face—

“No,” she said gently. “No. Thank you for asking me that. But no. You didn’t hurt me. I thought I communicated pretty clearly throughout that I was enjoying myself. That I was—enjoying you. I fell asleep because I was exhausted. I called Arjun so he wouldn’t worry. It was late.”

His shoulders sagged with relief and he rubbed his eyes. “I’m so glad, so glad I didn’t hurt you,” he muttered. Then he looked up and his face changed again, and he looked incredibly sad. “But—then how could you have done that to me?”

“Done what? What did I do?”

“You humiliated me! How did you think it felt to...do what we did, in the way that we did...and to have you get up and call Arjun?”

She shook her head. “You knew I was married. What did you have to complain about?”

He stared down at the table. “I have loved you from the day I met you, Chrisjen,” he said, his voice wavering, then steadying. “I have loved you for all of my life.”

At last, he had said it. She was surprised at the first thing that came into her head: If only you hadn’t waited so long. Where were all of these feelings emerging from? She had the uneasy sense that more was hiding in the dark of her mind, yet to be found. She didn’t like it.

He started speaking again. “One night wasn’t enough.” He looked up at her. “It tormented me.”

“I know you loved me,” she said softly. “That was always clear. But what I said to you last time I was here, I meant. You could never look me dead in the eye. Except that night. Just for a few minutes, that night. Even now—you have been saving those words for how many years? And you could not look at me as you spoke them. I knew you loved me. But what could I do? I don’t know what you wanted me to do.”

“Do?” he said. He rose from his chair and paced the room. “What did I want you to do? What do you think?! You have always known that I loved you? The last time you were here, you said you could have loved me if I could have convinced myself I deserved you!”

“So?”

“So?! Why did you work so hard to convince me that I didn’t?!”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I—“ he laughed incredulously and paused, shaking his head. Finally, he said, “You kept me at arm’s length, always. You condescended to me, treated me like a pet—I told Sorrento-Gillis once that you were like a mother to me.”

Oh GOD. “That’s nauseating.”

“Yes. I actually walked from his office and threw up.”

“Good.”

“But that’s how you acted every time I got too close. When Charanpal died, especially. But all the time. Right from the beginning. You respected me only when I was being an asshole. When I was kind to you, listened, cared, you shut me out with a motherly pat on the cheek. That night—I don’t know why. But that night I didn’t let you do it. I showed you how I felt when you touched me.”

She was silent. Then, finally, “I am older than you. You were my protégé. And I was married, and a mother. And our work—“

“None of that stopped you that night.”

She threw up her hands and rose from her chair, coming around the table to face him. “I wasn’t free to love you, Sadavir! I couldn’t let myself—“ she stopped. “I desired you. Of course I did. You must have known that. And I let myself have you, once. But I could not allow myself to love you!”

“No, Chrisjen! I didn’t know! I never knew! If you wanted me—people divorce; you could have—“

“Divorce? Of course I could have divorced. But Arjun has nothing to do with it! My god—that night, Sadavir! That night doesn’t explain it to you?”

“Explain what?”

“I didn’t let myself think about that night! I told myself it only needed to happen once. That you were out of my system. But you never were! You never will be!”

They both stumbled back a step, as if she had dealt them both a blow, as if physics had recently revised its laws so that air pressure was responsive to emotional bombshells as well as actual ones.

“What?” he said.

“I could have walked away from everything for what I felt with you that night. Given up government, spent my days tending some goddamned chickens and my nights loving you to exhaustion. I could have walked away. From all of it. For you. But I could not let that happen—I had a job to do. So you are right! I shut you out! Because Earth. Comes. First.”

He stood speechless for a moment. She put her hands to her face and no longer tried to blink back the tears. She felt as if the thing long trapped in the dark, the thing she had sensed with foreboding only a few minutes before, had broken free and shot through her; now it was diffusing through her bones and bloodstream and altering her, like—

“Chrisjen, I would never have asked you to walk away from the UN, from your work,” he said quietly.

“As if I would have done so out of marital obedience,” she snorted, recovering herself somewhat. “That isn’t it.” She sat down on the bed and brushed the tears from her cheeks and sighed. “I would have been different. I would have changed, if I had let you in. And I didn’t know what I might change into. I was afraid to find out. You would have been like...” she laughed shortly. “Like my own personal protomolecule.”

He sat down next to her. “I have thought the same about you. But I wasn’t able to shut you out.”

She didn’t know what to say. She supposed she had taken his quiet love for her to be a feature of the landscape; a pleasant mountain stream always available for gazing at, and only for her. She realized, with a rush of shame, that she had never really wondered what it must have been like for him to live in those feelings, day in and day out, for years. He lacked her ability to compartmentalize. She herself was only now realizing the extent of her skill at it.

Then he asked, “Do you love Arjun?”

She answered without hesitation. “Yes. Very much. But he has never asked me for more than he knew I was willing to give. It would not have been like that—with you. You have always underestimated yourself, Sadavir. I have never made that mistake.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“Chrisjen, I don’t know how to—where to go from here.”

“I don’t know either.” She stood up abruptly and walked to the door. “Send for me again when you have an idea.”

“Send for you?” She looked back at him. He remained sitting on his bed and looked immeasurably sad to see her leaving. “Is that what I’ve been doing?”

She smiled a little. “It would seem so.”

She called for the guard and when he opened the door, she swept from the room.

*  
That night, she told Arjun what had happened. A conversation ensued in which he told her that he had always known about the thing hiding in the dark.

*

The third message she received from him said:

Dear Chrisjen,  
I would like it if you came to see me again.  
Sadavir  
P.S. I am still not sure how to go forward. But I want to see you anyway.

Her eyes were puffy. But she smiled to herself and made a few phone calls.

The next day she arrived at the prison at lunchtime.

“Please bring me whatever he’s having,” she said to the flummoxed guard as he showed her in. “Don’t forget the shit coffee.”

He nearly choked on the bit of potato he was chewing at his small table. When he had finished cough-laughing, he croaked, “What are you doing? Why would you come here for lunch?”

“Because this is where you are,” she said.

He gazed at her as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard. “Okay,” he said at last, with a small smile. “Have a seat.”

The guard brought in a tray of chicken, potatoes, peas, hot coffee, and a glass of water and placed it in front of her. His hands shook a bit as he put it down and a little of the coffee sloshed out onto the chicken.

“Madam Secretary-General, I’m so sorry!” the man gasped. “I’ll get you another tray—“

“You will get the fuck out of this room and not return for at least three hours,” she declared.

“Of course, of course, I’m sorry, Madam, so sorry...I’m so sorry...”

The door closed behind him.

“That poor man was literally genuflecting as he backed out of the room.”

“I seem to have that effect on people. It is useful in my line of work.”

“You do,” he agreed. “And it is. You should eat your chicken before it gets colder.”

“The coffee will have warmed it up.”

“I should have thought of doing that myself. It might even improve the flavor.”

“No,” she concluded, after a bite of the chicken. “It does not.”

When they had finished lunch, he pushed his tray aside, folded his hands on the table, and looked at her gravely.

“You look awfully serious, Sadavir. What fresh hell is this?”

“I’ve really been thinking about it,” he said. “And I don’t know how to solve this.”

“Solve what?”

“You said I needed to believe I deserved you. Maybe at some point in the past I did. But now—“

“Yes. Now. Well, I’m the Secretary-General of the United Nations, keeping the birthplace of humanity safe in my bosom. And you are an accused traitor and war criminal. Which means that you are in prison and I am, at any given time, about three bad days from being your roommate.”

He burst out laughing and she was happy to see him laugh. It had been a long time.

Then he sobered. “I have caused a lot of suffering and death, and I have to live with that, Chrisjen. Every time I could have stopped and reversed course, I doubled down instead. I began with good intentions—I did—but in the end...I AM a traitor and a war criminal.”

“You also mix piloting and gambling metaphors. I’m not sure which is worse.”

He gave her a look.

“What do you want me to say? Humans play with toys and make messes, and the bigger toys we are given, the greater messes we make. You had the bad luck to make your mess with a lot of very large and destructive toys.”

“Please don’t dismiss what I’ve done, Chrisjen. I don’t want you to just overlook it. I need you to see it.”

“I do see it. I probably see it better than anyone, Sadavir. I cannot unsee, or unhear, that message.”

“I know.” He put his head in his hands.

“Look at me. Please.” He did. He looked terribly sad. “Please listen to me. We are not like most people. Our work has meant making decisions that have consequences for an entire planet, for the entire system, and even beyond that, now that the Ring has arrived. Most people never have to bear that burden. They can fuck up all they like and no one gets seriously hurt. Our fuck-ups occur on what is now, quite literally, a galactic scale, and when our decisions result in war and devastation and death, that is not because we are gods, but because we are not.”

“You have never done anything like what I did. Our fuck-ups aren’t the same. And I don’t want to make excuses for what I’ve done, Chrisjen. I don’t want you to, either.”

“I am not trying to make excuses for anything either of us has done. My point is just that we cannot change the past. We can only learn from it. We can move forward only by moving forward.”

“I just don’t want this—friendship—to be based on a fantasy, some projection of who we used to be. I want to see you, as you are, now, and I want you to see me. And if really seeing me means you don’t want to...see me...anymore, I would understand.”

“I see you,” she said gently. “Now, see me.” She stood up and he mirrored her action. She reached forward and took his hands across the narrow table. “I don’t want a friendship.” He didn’t speak, just widened his eyes for a moment and then smiled. He leaned forward and kissed her softly, and then deeply. Slowly. She kissed him back, and felt the kiss all through her body, flowing through her like clear water, unobstructed by detours and dark compartments. She was all sluices and aqueducts, open, sparkling, and free. She made a mental note to inform him before she left that afternoon that she loved him helplessly.

There was a knock at the door. “I’m busy,” he called. He tilted his head to the side and frowned. “Actually, I’m not sure I get to say that in here.”

She pulled away gently and stood. “I’m expecting a delivery.” The lock clicked and the door opened.

Two workmen entered the room carrying a large glass panel. “On the wall here, Madam Secretary-General?” one of them asked.

“Over the bed, please,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“What is this?” he asked, moving aside so the workmen could shuffle past the table, efficiently shift the bed, drag the chairs over, stand on them to install the panel on the ceiling, and move all the furniture back.

“It is a gift.”

“For me?”

“You can use it, too.”

“Madam,” the men said, nodding slightly and leaving the way they came.

“Lay down,” she commanded. He hesitated, then put out a hand. She smiled and took it and allowed him to lead her to the bed. He lay down on his back and with a tremendous rustle of silk she curled into his side, head on his shoulder, hand resting on his chest. “Skylight,” she said.

The panel came to life and flooded the grey room with light. Above them glowed the day’s blue sky, barely wispy with clouds. “The feed is from a camera on top of the UN building.”

“Chrisjen! Thank you!”

“Idiot,” she said affectionately. “It isn’t for you. I refuse to spend time in this awful room with no sky.”

“So...you’ll be spending time here?”

She sat up and bent her legs beneath her. “If you can look me in the eye and tell me you want me to.”

He sat up. He put a gentle hand on the nape of her neck and stroked her cheek with his thumb. He looked her in the eyes, and said, “I do. I want you to come and see me, as much as you can. I want you to come more often than is convenient for you.”

She smiled. “Then I will.” She laid back, pulling his body gently down onto hers as she did so. “I will allow this to interfere with my duties to the United Nations to a shocking degree.”

He looked down at her. “Does that mean I come first?”

She looked up at him. “You’d damn well better not.”

*

“I like that you cannot see space from here,” she said afterwards, lying on her back and looking up through (at) the fake but very convincing skylight.

He was on his side, his head propped on one bent arm and the other resting lightly on her midriff. He laughed. “That’s because it’s two in the afternoon. The stars will come out eventually.”

She made a dismissive gesture, as if she could sweep the stars from the sky.

“Yes, I know,” he said with affection. “You hate space. It is truly a space age, though, Chrisjen. New technology, new worlds, new everything—all out there in the dark. Or so I’ve heard.”

“All overrated. I prefer the blue. Look at it! The sky is beautiful today. What would you call that color, my love?”

“Heaven blue,” he suggested, and leaned over to kiss her.


End file.
